“How we got from a state constitution requiring that the legislature “provide for the maintenance and support of a system of free common schools, wherein all the children of this state may be educated” to laws taking away the right of citizens to determine what they spend for that “free” education is a long and hard legal and policy road. I know that, here in the trenches, the events of the past couple of weeks have been enough to take your democratic breath away.”

The chances of citizens winning at the school board, are the same chances of a parent righting a wrong at the school level. Democracy principles really do not exist for the average citizen, when centralization is imposed upon the citizens.

“After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”
Alexis de Tocqueville

The erosion of democracy in NA is startling!  We, the public, are all at fault for allowing this to happen.  How far is it going to go?